Creating a WordPress Child Theme

Child themes are the safest way to customize and tweak your WordPress theme while still allowing you to apply updates to your site. At this meetup, we’ll discuss what a child theme is and the benefits of using one. We’ll also go through the process of creating and activating a child theme, as well as how to make modifications to your WordPress site using a child theme.

Presented by: Liz MacDonell.  Liz is a web developer and digital product manager. Liz started working with and falling in love with WordPress 3 years ago.

NOTE: Child themes, while not a basic topic, are an extremely important topic, and everyone who manages a WordPress site should know how to create a child theme.  Liz is targeting this talk to be at a beginner level so that users of all levels can learn how to use child themes on their sites.

Agenda

6:00 – General announcements

6:05 – Presentation(s)

7 ish – Questions

7:30 – Open help session “Happiness Bar” – get answers to your WordPress questions.

Meeting Details:

LOCATION NOTE:

We have a private space reserved downstairs. Enter the main doors, turn left, and down the stairs.

No donations for this meeting!  If attendees buy enough food etc. from the pub it covers our tab.  (We normally ask for a $4 donation to help cover the cost of the room and our Meetup fees, which total about $150-450/year)

The low down on free SSL certificates

UPDATE: Due to Rick helpfully pointing out that the Amazon AWS SSL Certificate is only for sites hosted on EC2 AWS instances, we’re going to scale back a touch on the AWS portion of the talk, and replace with some discussion on the Free SSL Certificate provided by Let’s Encrypt. We’ll also briefly discuss the Free SSL provided by Shopify even though this isn’t WordPress related.

Very recently, Google has announced that all websites not running on HTTPS will actually be receiving an SEO penalty, a change in their Algorithm that will be implemented sometime in 2016. Combined with the fact that a majority of E-Commerce Payment Gateways already insist on sites using HTTPS as a condition of usage (ie Stripe), plus Facebook insisting on HTTPS for most higher-level FB Applications, it is abundantly clear that anyone with a website needs to make HTTPS part of their routine…which means you NEED to know about SSL Certificates.

SSL Certificates are not new of course, they’ve been around for years…and unfortunately cost money. However, another recent announcement from Amazon AWS has informed the world that they offer SSL Certificates for FREE. When compared to the state of the SSL industry in the past, this Free SSL product from Amazon AWS is a real game-changer.

At this Meetup, we’re going to go through the ins-and-outs of an Amazon SSL Certificate, and set one up LIVE on a website right at the Meetup. This is one talk you do NOT want to miss, especially if your work is in the E-Commerce field. Our speaker, Jordan St Jacques, will be doing all the research ahead of time, and deciphering it in easy-to-follow steps. After this talk, you’ll feel more confident in dealing with the AWS SSL product, and be able to save yourself a pile of cash!

Jordan St Jacques is an Ottawa and Boston-based best-in-class Digital Marketer and intermediate (still growing!) coder. Formerly from the Concert Industry, Jordan worked independently and also for LiveNation and Viacom during a 20 year run that ended in 2013. His entry into the digital world started in 2004, when he became one of the first people in the world to take a MySpace profile over 1,000,000 Friends, and he’s been delivering similar digital results ever since.

Agenda

6:00 – General announcements

6:05 – Presentation(s)

7 ish – Questions

7:30 – Open help session “Happiness Bar” – get answers to your WordPress questions.

Meeting Details:

LOCATION NOTE:

We have a private space reserved downstairs. Enter the main doors, turn left, and down the stairs.

No donations for this meeting!  If attendees buy enough food etc. from the pub it covers our tab.  (We normally ask for a $4 donation to help cover the cost of the room and our Meetup fees, which total about $150-450/year)

Managing Content in WordPress

WordPress can be an excellent CMS, but content needs to be structured properly so it can easily be managed long term as your content and website grows.

WordPress has many different ways of adding information to your site. This includes:

• creation of posts

• assignment to categories and other taxonomies

• use of widgets

• general website options

It is important to use these different methods of creating content and overall, adding information to your website appropriately. If the wrong approach is taken to add content, it can cause problems of all sorts. For example, you may have to tediously update the same snippet of text in 50 places, possibly missing some areas. Poor content structure can also lead to a lot of unnecessary work. Maybe you manually created an archive page of posts and you now need to update the page content every time you create a new post. If a proper content structure is in place, this, and many other components, should update automatically.

For this presentation, a custom demo website will be created which will demonstrate various ways of managing content.  The pros and cons of each method will be discussed as well as appropriate use cases. It will show that although all the different methods produce the same output visually, how the content is managed “under the hood” can be vastly different.

Presented by: Steve Puddick.  Steve is the primary web developer at the Liberal Party of Canada where he works on a highly customized, large scale instance of WordPress. During this past election he lead the development of liberal.ca and realchange.ca.

Agenda

6:00 – General announcements

6:05 – Presentation(s)

7 ish – Questions

7:30 – Open help session “Happiness Bar” – get answers to your WordPress questions.

Meeting Details:

LOCATION NOTE:

We have a private space reserved downstairs. Enter the main doors, turn left, and down the stairs.

No donations for this meeting!  If attendees buy enough food etc. from the pub it covers our tab.  (We normally ask for a $4 donation to help cover the cost of the room and our Meetup fees, which total about $150-450/year)